Psychosis: Genius, Insanity, and Everything Between.

By: Wallis Shimmel

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Mental disorders leading to psychosis are complex and presently not fully understood. They have been studied for millennia, but in the past decade of research, more has been learned about the disease through worldwide genetic analysis and the use of fMRI to uncover more evidence about the reasons it has not been eliminated from the human gene pool through negative selection pressure. It is possible that psychosis exists because it is evolutionarily adaptive and may be a byproduct of the cognitive advancement that has led to higher order thinking and language, which are attributes at the core of what is considered to make us human. Although masses of people have been misled by the media regarding the disease and the debilitation that it causes, the subclinical levels of the disease in the general population are much higher than most realize, and there have been historical and evolutionary advantages that have existed as a result of the disorder, which is arguably still true today in modern societies.